Tom Getz blames the origin of his liver cancer on two Pacific Gas & Electric Co. compressor stations that leaked chromium-6 into nearby underground water supplies.

From 1966 to about 1969, Getz and his wife, Drew, lived a few miles north of the Hinkley compressor station. He and his family moved around as he advanced in his career, and in the 1990s he landed a job with Northrop Grumman working on B-2 stealth bombers.

"I remember I was under a lot of pressure," and to help break those work-related tensions, one evening he and Drew went to see 'Erin Brockovich.'"

It was the first time the Getz household heard that Hinkley's groundwater had a pollution problem.

"I remember thinking, 'Thank God we were drinking bottled water,' " he said in a recent interview.

But the reality was that the Getz family used contaminated well water for the swamp cooler, cooking and bathing, and chromium-6 is just as toxic when inhaled.

Many years after they left Hinkley, their former house was purchased by PG&E and leveled. Behind a tall fence that rings the property are numerous testing wells, Tom Getz said.

Years later they learned that the well on their former property tested at 29 parts per billion of chromium-6, a level higher than any household well now registers in Hinkley, but significantly below the California drinking water standard for total chromium, which is 50 ppb.

In 2001, Tom Getz, 77, retired in Topock, Ariz., a small unincorporated community on the eastern banks of the Colorado River.

He loves his view, he said, but he is on the Arizona side of PG&E's Topock compressor station, about 12 miles southeast of Needles.

Topock is the first of three pressure boosts for a PG&E natural gas artery vital to some 15 million customers in central and northern California. Hinkley is the second boost and Kettleman City is the third.

All three compressor units have varying degrees of environmental problems related to decades-ago use of chromium-6 in cooling towers.

The operators of twin 34-inch pipelines hand off natural gas from Texas to the PG&E pipeline at the Topock station.

On its underground trip, natural gas loses pressure and needs a boost every 200 miles to keep it moving at an optimum pace, said Jeff McCarthy, who is the on-site manager of the Hinkley remediation effort and a former superintendent of the Hinkley compressor station.

Topock is the first boost on the line after another pipeline operator delivers Texas natural gas to the California border. Hinkley is where the second boost occurs. Then a compressor station in Kings County, named after the unincorporated community of Kettleman City, gives the Texas energy the final pressure surge before it moves into a complex PG&E network of smaller pipes for delivery to customers.

All three PG&E compressor stations in California that support pipelines containing Texas natural gas have had or are now experiencing significant environmental issues.

When any gas is compressed, it gets hot. That's why natural gas compressor sites have cooling towers, which are tall, narrow metal tanks containing water to drain heat from the recently compressed gas.

By taking heat out of the natural gas, it becomes more dense and travels more efficiently in the pipeline, McCarthy said.

In the 1950s and 1960s, chromium-6 was commonly used to control rust and microbes in cooling tower water. Periodically it was dumped into unlined ponds.

Like Hinkley, the Topock compressor is in San Bernardino County.

Between 1951 and 1964, PG&E used chromium-6 at Topock, and periodically the cooling fluids would be dumped into nearby Bat Cave Wash, an unlined dry wash area, where it either percolated into groundwater or evaporated.

The Getzes are one of several families scattered up and down the Arizona side of the Colorado River, across from the Topock plant, that believe PG&E's California operations have contaminated their underground water and soil with chromium-6.

Currently, scientists from the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, which is overseeing this cleanup, believe that the chromium-6 plume on the California side does not touch Arizona soil.

No California residents drink the chromium-6 contaminated groundwater under the plant, the DTSC said.

Currently, the DTSC does not believe chromium-6 from the California compressor station has migrated to Arizona lands.

"Although DTSC is a California agency, we can hold a party responsible for the entire extent of the contamination even if it crosses state boundaries. If the contamination did cross the state boundary line into Arizona, DTSC would work with Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to ensure PG&E is held accountable for the necessary cleanup," said Sandy Nax, DTSC spokesman, in a prepared statement.

Jeff Smith, PG&E spokesman in Hinkley, said the desert around Topock, Ariz., has a high level of naturally occurring chromium-6.

But more than a few residents reject that statement.

The Getz family gets water from a private water company in town. When Erin Brockovich came to Topock last year, their water was tested, and it was found to contain 12 ppb chromium-6.

"Twice we have unknowingly been exposed to harmful levels of chromium-6," Tom Getz said.

The water the Getz family receives from the tap is well below the California standard of 50 ppb total chromium. But because they reside in Arizona, the federal standard prevails, meaning the danger threshold doubles to above 100 ppb total chromium.

Like they did in Hinkley, members of this transplanted Arizona household buy bottled water for drinking, but for cooking, tooth-brushing and bathing they use water from the tap.

Californians Angela and Tom Buchlor, who bought a house in a different part of Topock than where the Getz family resides learned their well had .08 ppb chromium-6 after an associate of Brockovich tested it.

The couple left their dream home in Arizona and relocated to Lytle Creek out of concern for the chromium-6 in their well.

"I was having nosebleeds, and the dog was having digestive issues," Angela Buchlor said. Both the nosebleeds and the dog's stomach problems ceased immediately after the couple moved back to their home in Lytle Creek, she said.

The third compressor station is in a "geologically isolated" spot in Kings County that is nearer Avenal than Kettleman City, said Clay Rodgers, assistant executive director of the Central Valley Water Quality Control Board, a sister state agency of the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, which oversees the Hinkley cleanup.

Doug Patterson, supervising engineer for the Central Valley board, said that the water under the Kettleman compressor is 500 feet deep with a large clay barrier between the plant and the water. Thus, unlike in Hinkley, this compressor plant's chromium-6 did not reach the groundwater, which also unlike Hinkley, is not the source of well water for residents.

Nevertheless, some 1,500 plaintiffs shared a $295 million case settlement in 2006, some 10 years after Hinkley's settlement of $333 million, split by a little more than 300 people.

Erin Brockovich and some of the same attorneys in the Hinkley lawsuit worked on the Kettlemen case in what some called a Brockovich/PG&E "sequel."

The plaintiffs were primarily PG&E employees who were either assigned to work at the Kettleman station, or PG&E linemen who attended a school that operates on land shared with compressor operations, said Smith, the PG&E spokesman.